Will the Dragon Fly? : L.B. Aerospace Mavericks Say They Are Designing Jet of the Future
As a teen-ager during the 1940s, Bill Moody built model airplanes, carefully cutting balsa wood and piecing together a tiny frame that he then covered with tissue paper and painted to resemble warplanes of the era.
Today, Moody dreams of building aircraft of a different sort.
In a remote hangar at Long Beach Airport, the 52-year-old graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has assembled a small, tightly knit band of engineers and declared war on the giants of the aerospace industry. Their mission: to design and build a delta-wing jet called the Dragon.
As Moody envisions it, the Dragon would one day replace the helicopter in military arsenals throughout the world while winning a spot in the jet fleets of innumerable corporations.
The highly sophisticated aircraft wouldn’t need a runway. Instead, the Dragon would use jet nozzles on its underbelly to vertically take off and land as well as hover like a hummingbird. In addition, the aircraft would do something no mere helicopter could match: With its twin jet engines at full throttle, the Dragon could accelerate to speeds exceeding Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound.
Perhaps best of all, Moody says his Long Beach-based firm, the Phalanx Organization Inc., will eventually deliver a flight-ready Dragon for as little as $1.75 million, making the plane a virtual steal in the high-priced world of military and corporate aircraft.
There’s only one catch. So far, the Dragon exists only on paper.
Nonetheless, Moody and his maverick pack of engineers have pressed forward, fueled by visions of a sky abuzz with Dragons.
In hopes of setting loose such a swarm, the firm has entered the aircraft in the Army’s high-stakes competition to select its 21st-Century superchopper, a showdown that pits the Dragon against helicopters being designed by such industry giants as Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. No firm selection date has been set.
The Dragon has been greeted with some interest by the Army. Although military officials doubt the aircraft will be able to meet the performance objectives Moody has set, the aircraft “sufficiently intrigues us,” said Maj. Philip Soucey, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon.
“Any marginal achievement will increase our intrigue,” Soucey said. “We are monitoring his project with interest.”
Soucey said the Army received Moody’s entry as an “unsolicited proposal” but will give it full consideration.
Taken Seriously
“Our opinion is that it would have been as wrong to tell Mr. Moody to go away as it was when they decided to close the U.S. Patent Office around the turn of the century because everything had been invented,” Soucey said.
The military’s willingness to take Moody seriously comes as little surprise given the man’s aerospace credentials.
After graduating from MIT with degrees in aeronautical and mechanical engineering, Moody worked with some of the legends of the aircraft industry, including Germany’s Willy Messerschmitt. A one-time employee of Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo, Moody has been involved in the aerospace industry for nearly two decades, taking part in the design of numerous aircraft while serving as president of both the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences and the Rocket Society.
Before establishing the Phalanx Organization in 1984, Moody founded several other firms, including an ongoing concern that uses plastic-like composite materials to manufacture architectural ornamentation for buildings.
A bespectacled man with a slight paunch and a penchant for puffing on a pipe, Moody has the look of an absent-minded professor. But when the veteran aerospace engineer spreads blueprints of the Dragon on a table in his cluttered office, it becomes apparent he means business.
Moody recruited several friends and former associates to aid him in his quest. Among them is H. W. Jamieson, a founder and former executive at Litton Industries who is president of Phalanx. Others are Patrick Hillings, a former U.S. congressman from Arcadia who is acting as Phalanx’s corporate attorney, and Leo Windecker, who developed the first U.S. military aircraft constructed of composite materials.
Moody said he was able to attract such aerospace talent as Jamieson and Windecker because they became frustrated with the bureaucratic roadblocks at the aircraft giants. Such firms, Moody said, design aircraft “by committee.”
In contrast, the Phalanx Organization is “lean and aggressive,” with each of its 30 full-time employees playing a pivotal role, Moody said. Phalanx has also been aided by half a dozen part-time employees moonlighting from their jobs at larger aircraft firms, he said.
While Moody gushes about the Dragon’s potential, skeptics question whether the project will ever get off the ground.
Christopher Demisch, a vice president and aerospace analyst with the New York-based investment banking firm of First Boston Corp., said he saw mock-ups of the Dragon on display at the recent Paris Air Show and came away “doubting that this is a better mousetrap.”
In his 16 years as an industry analyst, Demisch said he has seen at least half a dozen proposals that, like the Dragon, were touted as developments that would revolutionize the aerospace industry.
“In all those cases, the effort came to naught,” Demisch said. “Aviation is an industry that gets people’s creative juices flowing. The reality seems to be that every development in aviation costs enormous amounts of money.”
‘Laughable Figure’
Moody said he plans to spend between $3.5 million and $5 million--all of it from the profits of his other firms--to develop the Dragon. Demisch called those estimates of research funds “an almost laughable figure” and insisted it would not be enough.
But Demisch refrained from totally ruling out the Dragon.
“I never want to say it can’t be done,” he cautioned. “There have been instances of breakthroughs in technology. If he can actually produce a device that has the kind of performance he’s talking about, he’ll really have something.”
Moody insists the Dragon will become a reality. But he recognizes there are doubters like Demisch.
“We’re not going to reach a point where we can overcome the skepticism until we have a signed contract or a piece of hardware,” he said, adding that Phalanx expects to have the Dragon flying in 14 months and ready for production about a year later.
Despite its high-tech appearance and potential, the Dragon is little more than the compilation of past aircraft designs and existing production techniques, Moody said. Because of that, Moody said he has no doubts the Dragon will perform as expected.
“There’s no new technology at all in this aircraft,” Moody said. “It’s an amalgamation of existing technology.”
The aircraft is based on the tried and flight-tested principle of the British-built Harrier “jump jet,” a vertical-takeoff aircraft that performed outstandingly in the Falkland Islands War between Britain and Argentina.
Like a proud father, Moody boasts that the Dragon’s lightweight design and extreme maneuverability will make it the hottest fighter in the skies, able to best the world’s most sophisticated combat aircraft.
Four Tall Fins
To accomplish such feats, Moody has designed a flying machine that would make Luke Skywalker proud. The jet’s squat, triangular fuselage is ringed by four tail fins. A tiny set of delta wings protrude from the nose of the aircraft, which is built almost entirely of composite materials that are lightweight, strong--and inexpensive.
The idea has generated some interest from states eager to attract new industries. Officials of the state of Indiana, for example, said they would consider offering loans and other incentives if Phalanx builds a plant there. Any deals, however, are on hold until Phalanx snags a contract--either from the United States or abroad--to build the plane.
In February, an Indianapolis-based real estate investment firm participating in negotiations with Phalanx hired a Purdue University professor to study the Dragon and take a look at Moody’s 40,000-square-foot operation in Long Beach.
W. A. Gustafson, associate dean of Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said he feels the Dragon is “a good concept,” but suggested there remain “some unknowns” about the project. Such questions, Gustafson said, will only be dispelled after wind-tunnel and flight testing.
Moody, meanwhile, insists the Dragon will be a success, pointing in part to historical precedence as proof. As he tells it, most major developments in the aircraft industry have occurred at small companies, not in the cozy confines of the industrial giants.
“We are a source of revolutionary thought, whereas the aerospace establishment, by its very nature, is evolutionary,” he said. “Corporate boards and administrators can’t dictate innovative concepts. Most of the time they stand in the way of revolutionary progress.”
Spokesmen for several large aircraft firms, while reluctant to criticize Moody’s efforts to build the Dragon, took issue with his comments about the aerospace establishment.
“Revolutionary thinking is not foreign to the corporate laboratory,” said Robert Mack, public affairs director for McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Co. in Culver City. “You don’t win a contract to build an aircraft if you don’t think in a revolutionary way.”
Moody does not expect U.S. military leaders to immediately embrace the Dragon, in large part because, he said, his firm lacks “geopolitical clout” at the Pentagon. But the Dragon, with its price tag and performance features, would be too good a deal for most foreign countries to pass up, he said.
Cost Savings
For the cost of a $42-million F-14 Tomcat, a buyer could have a squadron of 20 Dragons and still have money left over for missiles and ammunition, Moody said. That cost savings would be similar for helicopter buyers; the U.S. Army now buys its top-of-the-line Apache helicopter from McDonnell Douglas for $10 million, he said.
While the Dragon could sell well as a corporate aircraft, Moody said its first order of business would be military. He sees the aircraft as the perfect weapon to combat the waves of Soviet tanks that would sweep across Europe in an all-out invasion.
That may seem a warlike endeavor, but Moody views it in different terms. If the Dragon could stop Soviet tanks, the United States and its allies would have little need for nuclear weapons in Europe, Moody reasons.
“A secretary of mine once asked how I could do what I am doing,” Moody said. “But I see this work as something that can help stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And that is a worthwhile task.”
